You know I once got a speeding ticket in a Ford aspire, for doing 86 uphill with a missfiring cylinder (and other issues).
Needless to say I got that one tossed out. If you told me an Apire made to 86 falling off a cliff I'd want to know how much cement you had to pack into it.
I've since upgraded to a better Ford, this one is convertable and has this nice horse motif. I guarantee it's faster than the Aspire (3x the engine size for starters).
Oh I believe, I've had simular incedents that didn't go quite as far.
The first was one night on the way home I had this jacked up truck come up behind me doing at least 80 (in a 60, I was doing 60-65) and plant itself about 8 feet off my rear bumper and park there despite it being a two lane highway with no-one else on it in sight.
This truck then proceded to turn on it's brights nearly blinding me with the glare for a split second. I have to duck under the glare and start slowing down hoping the idiot will go around.
Instead the truck just gets closer and starts honking it's horn. Figuring I should get away from the idiot I change lanes, idiot follows, I change again, ditto. So I pull into a brightly lit gas station near my house (where they recognize me) and the truck follows and I see this soccor mom looking woman with a big dog in the cab just starring straight ahead so I go in and call the police. She leaves before they get there.
The second incedent was a few years ago and involved a bunch of teenagers in a car jumping lanes around. They started to jump in front of me from behind a car who's rear bumper was only about 5 feet in front of my front bumper and I had to break and honk at them to avoid getting hit.
They proceded to take offence and start yelling at me and calling me names and such and then got behind me and started jacking around with running up on me and gesturing and so on. So I drove to a police substation nearby and strangly enough despite thier yelling at me to pull over so they could 'kick my ass' the didn't pull into the parkinglot behind me. wonder if the half dozen police cars also parked there had anything to do with it.
Speeding does slow you down. Especially when it's significantly faster than the limit/traffic flow.
The reasoning is simple, there are enough people who don't want to get ticketed, die in a car wreck, ect. that when you are trying to maintain the high rate of speed you will eventually have to go around one of them, and sooner or later you will get stuck in the outside lane by one. The outside lane is called the slow lane for a reason. By the time you Unstick yourself the cars you were in front of in the other lane have already passed you.
Not only that but the spacing and cycle duration of red lights is such that you typically find yourself stoped at one for long enough that all those 'slowpokes' you left behind are now right next to you also waiting for the light to change.
And of course over the long haul the time you spend pulled over getting a ticket brings the average way down (as doese the wasted time on the bus when you finally loose your drivers license).
I average about 30k miles a year, mostly local travel on a few highways and local roads. And based on my experience a fast car is slower than a smart driver. I've frequently pulled up to red lights next to the guy who was so frantic to pass me (when I was already doing the speed limit) twice in about three years I've caught up to the guy made plain his discontent at my only doing +5 over on the highway, except he was pulled over and I'm shure I got where I was going well before he did. I've had idiots 'pass' me three or four times because thier in such a hurry they get themselves repeatedly stuck behind slower traffic.
Speeding does slow you down. Especially when it's significantly faster than the limit/traffic flow.
The reasoning is simple, there are enough people who don't want to get ticketed, die in a car wreck, ect. that when you are trying to maintain the high rate of speed you will eventually have to go around one of them, and sooner or later you will get stuck in the outside lane by one. The outside lane is called the slow lane for a reason. By the time you Unstick yourself the cars you were in front of in the other lane have already passed you.
Not only that but the spacing and cycle duration of red lights is such that you typically find yourself stoped at one for long enough that all those 'slowpokes' you left behind are now right next to you also waiting for the light to change.
And of course over the long haul the time you spend pulled over getting a ticket brings the average way down (as doese the wasted time on the bus when you finally loose your drivers license).
I average about 30k miles a year, mostly local travel on a few highways and local roads. And based on my experience a fast car is slower than a smart driver. I've frequently pulled up to red lights next to the guy who was so frantic to pass me (when I was already doing the speed limit) twice in about three years I've caught up to the guy made plain his discontent at my only doing +5 over on the highway, except he was pulled over and I'm shure I got where I was going well before he did. I've had idiots 'pass' me three or four times because thier in such a hurry they get themselves repeatedly stuck behind slower traffic.
Define to slow, if you mean the speed limit then by definition they are not going to slow, but rather as fast as permited and if you want to got faster you have no right to insist they get a ticket for you.
And no right to inconvience them by insisting they change lanes or whatever just so you can get a ticket sooner.
Smart driving will save more time than speeding anyway.
The funny thing is all those idiots trying to go so fast are usually stupid enough that they finally lane jocky themselves behind someone doing the minimum and get stuck there.
Of course some manage to do it repeatedly. I recall a few times when the SAME idiot passed by me several times.
I read an article a few years back where ADDING routes for traffic to take actually added to congestion in some cases.
This one city had two basic routs between points a lot of traffic went through and to ease congestion they ran a third road. Congestion went up. After doing some math they realized the problem and made the new road not through and congestion went back down.
Wish I could rember why that worked that way (and no it wasn't grandma/bubba/blondie getting confused over which way to go and parking in everyones way eigther.
Really? I've done quite a bit of driving and haven't yet seen an accident cause by driving to slow.
I've seen (and been involved in) ones cause by people panic stoping or just being stoped without a foot on the break where it's not expected.
However I've seen plenty of accidents caused by people in to big a hurry and eigther lane jumping agressively (and hitting someone or causing the person they cut in front of to slam on the breaks to avoid them) or entering the road or intersection without looking.
I've also seen some caused by idiots trying to use the center lane (the one with yellow stripes on both sides) to make a left ONTO (illeagle in Missouri, USA) the road rather than to exit it as intended.
Actualy it's not the slower drivers, provided they're at or near the speed-limit (in good conditions), granny or bubba doing 30 in a 60 on a nice day is going to be a problem.
Your momentary speed means very little compared to your average.
I drive a LOT, much of it through a township notorious for ticketing it if it moves, and value my good driving record.
I frequently watch as some idiot trying to go 20+ over jumps back and forth between lanes only to eigther arrive at the next red light seconds before I do (these are the 'good' ones) or to arrive there about 5 car lengths behind me in the other lane (these are the guys who at the first sign of a slowdown jump lanes, usually it's from the left lane to the right lane because someone up ahead slowed a bit to enter a turn lane, then the left lane goese back to limit+5 while the idiot is stuck in the right lane with bubba doing 50 in 60).
Driving faster than everyone else doesn't get you there faster, it just wastes your time and energy while risking your driving record and potentially causing serious issues.
What gets you somewhere faster is SMART driving. I pay attention to traffic flow and know the area around where I live and try to keep it around the speed limit or just above.I have seen the same idiot lane jocky and pass me 4 or 5 times, constantly having to speed up and slow down and get stuck and frustrated behind one person or another and put all sorts of wear and tear on his car and the nerves of all involved. All while I'm still calmly driving along in the same lane (usually the left, it's tend to move a bit faster consistantly with fewer merge-exit cycles)enjoying the sunshine with the top down listening to a cd or radio without tearing up my car.
One sort of Idiot I dont' understand is the guy in the big truck or suv who insists on getting right behind me at night (when frequently I'm the only other vehical out there) and when I'm not going 80+ in a 60, turns on his brights rather than go around. Since my vision is now impared by the glare and I've got someone way to close to me for the speed I'm going to slow down as best I can to try and avoid a wreck (which can be nasty in a convertible).
Actually the ones going to fast are also often jumping lanes. THIS causes people to have to break suddenly compressing the whole collum of traffic behind them if it's near rush hour (but not durring an actual traffic jam, not that you can lane jocky then) which takes longer to decompress and reach normal speed than it took to slow down.
Unless you got a lot a lot of people doing -5 or more without good reason I'd guesse the main cause of congestion is insufficient road ways primarly followed by idiots who think the gas pedal and not thier brains are the key to quicker trip times.
I'm not shure if any of the current (or next gen) consoles or even pc games for that matter do this, but in 3dsMax you have prodcedural textures.
If games were to do this where possible it would scale indefinately. However there is bound to be a significant cpu overhead. Especially when you get translucency and reflection and subsurface scattering involved.
The more I think about the more likely it seems we've got a bit of a wait before this is standard in consoles.
As far as the slowdowns to outright lockups I've seen that fairly consistantly in windows and linux over the last few years (using any adobe plug-in to browser, the straight viewer has had odd sluggishness on both platforms as well), if it's not so on Mac (I'll take your word for it) I would suggest it's case of third rate porting.
As far as what format to send dtp type documents in, almost any other works better imho. And the sort of layout you describe is for eventual paper production, not online information.
EVERY pdf I've ever dealt with was braindamaged somehow and usually no way to fix it. Like most websites these days.
Pdf is simply "here's MY layout, which foolishly imitates a book, and your stuck with it" most of the time anyway. Authors needless lock out all sorts of changes including c&p so I can't even copy it to notepad to change the idiot font.
If you want me to read it then put it in a format I can read or at least make readable.
I don't know about those sizes you list, but a few of those I gave MUCH more time (5 minutes or more on one) to download when slashdots front page (71k as I type this) took only a couple seconds.
Considering my browser is unusable and the rest of my computer sluggish (an amd3550+ with a gig of ram on a good socket 939 mb, a simple document reader shouldn't even be noticed, let alone drag everything to a crawl), I think 5 min is more than fair.
Like I said what's wrong with at least offering an ocr conversion? it'd be less than 100k for all the doc's most likely and MUCH more readable.
To be fair half of my loathing of pdf stems from adobe's brain dead programming (or porting as the case may be) and belief that it's o.k. to lock out the end user from viewing docs how he want's to and wrapping the whole mess in a bad emulation of a book with a craptacular interface.
I sorta thought the not closeing when closed issue was miss-communications. I'm used to closing the master window also closing the program in windows and linux. If you don't want to close a program but get it out of your way just minimize it or move it to another desktop or even iconize it. This way you've always got a clear indicator that it's running still (in theory at least, YMMV). I would hope Mac's provide some way to intuitively know when a program is or isn't still running after you close it's main window.
I know what you mean (I loose people all the time, I'm starting to get good at noticing when the nods go from interested to lost:)
But I was actualy making a joke on how MINDPRISON got a song stuck in my head.
You start sending conscripts and prisoners to the moon and there is no telling what could happen, why someone could start throwing big rocks at you. Wouldn't be to hard with the right computer helping out, not that I'd know anything about that of course.
Mycroft
Re:Proof the movie companies are ripping us off!
on
Attack of the $1 DVDs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Mostly you are right. The difference is in recent movies.
A short copyright time, or even median one (say 10-20years like patents) enables the creators to recover things like the odzillion dollars spent on special effects, computer animation, Mr. Muslce's and Miss T.A.'s salary.
However once this money is recouped and a fair amount of time has passed to allow for some proffit, copyright should expire, to drop prices and enrich culture as intended.
So what makes them greedy is thier insistance on keeping thier monopoly long past the time necessary for them to recoup costs and make a fair (admitedly a subject measure) proffit. Especially when they keep something they have no intent of releasing 'just in case' they find a way to get rich off of it or at least to deny potential competitors somethinge they could make $$ off of.
Personally I think copyright should back to it's original (here in the US) time frame or somewhat shorter (especially where computer programs are concerned). I also think if something goese unpublished or the copyright holders cannot be found for ten years (five for software imho) it should be declared an abondoned copyright and moved into the public domain.
I've heard we have movies on old nitrate stock or simular falling apart to be forever lost because the proper holders of the copyright have died and the people who inherit them cannot be found to get permision to copy them into non-degrading formats. At the very least a law could be passed to permit preservative copying of originals that would otherwise be lost.
It's a result of the US signing the Berne convention in 1989. At least I'm pretty shure it's the Berne convention that caused it and that was signed by the US in 1989.
PDF tries to be 'make a computer a book' format, and it's as proprietary as.doc except that it's a bit less obfuscated.
And most of the time it's used the same way online, to bloat text an order or three of magnitude in size.
Though I do agree html shouldn't be invariant, that completely defeats the purpose of html imho.
Using a pdf to bundle images together is the closest thing I've seen to a rational use for it, but that is not it's main use and some manage to even screw doing that up.
The fact that people use it to bundle images of text is just insane when it's a few pages. How about using some ocr software and running a spell check? You get a few k rather than a few megs and don't wast bandwith or need to use a booklike format to bundle the docs.
I understand in a few rare cases actual images of a document are what's needed, but I contend that a format designed for just that sort of thing would be a better idea.
And maybe YOU can download a multi-megabyte file in.5 seconds with adobe's brain-dead software. But that's not the case for everyone.
In fact that's (I suspect) the real problem. If the document isn't fully downloaded adobe sits there insisting it hog the cpu in a very multi-tasking unfriendly way. On slower connection this means if you hit a pdf link that goes to a file more than your.5 second in download time your browser is hosed and your computer brought to a crawl. This is braindead programming.
Frankly I've rarely seen anything that wouldn't have been easier to read and comprehend in eigther html or text. When 99% of the time a format makes viewing the content less intuitive and more difficult the odds are it's broken, eighter conceptually (as in trying to make a computer a book) or funtionally (as in bloats things way up in size or makes them hard to navigate/read). There is a tiny chance that it's just missused 99% of the time, but in that case it's not being targetted to it's proper audience.
As an aside I consider any software that doesn't stop running when I close it out to be broken, you seem to call this fourtunate because this break cancels out adobe's load bloat?!? If everything I ran did that I'd soon have all my memory(ram and virtual) taken up by programs I've supposedly closed.
Since Mac's aren't known for huge memory leaks or needing to re-boot more often than win95 I suspect a missunderstanding here somewhere.
It's like the people who buy things they don't need because the item is 'on sale' for $5 less and insist thier saving $5.
NO, they are NOT saving $5. But try convincing one of them that (don't try to hard, someone may have a psycotic break in the process).
It's not FF, it's the adobe plug-in that has issues with pdf's and takes up 99.9% of the cpu and locks up the browser.
It does the same in IE and I would be suprised to se it do that in any other browser adobe makes a plug in for.
Even if adobe's plug in didn't do stupid things, PDF's are stupid (imho) idea with a poor implentation that I don't want to support.
A computer is different kind of medium than a book, just because they can both use text and pictures doesn't make them interchangeable. And creating a format that bloats text and pics to huge sizes in a braindamaged attempt to make a computer into a book is like fixing up a car to make galloping noises and crap on the road and require reigns to drive and cost 150% of normal.
It's a waste of bandwith and serves no real purpose other than to put $$$ in adobe's coffers.
If you are a consultant/contractor/employee directly (or near enough so) responsible for this field then it would make sense to make use of the logs generated on the job.
However you say USED to work for. In this case they not only have the normal lack of 'chain of liability' should something go wrong with things from using your logs, but they have the added potential isue of a disgruntled employee.
Remember we live in a society where a peeping tom can climb onto a private residence to look through a ladies skylight at her and then SUCCEFULLY sue her when he falls through it.
If they can't 100% cover thier butts in terms of liability it's against thier best intrest to even aknowledge your logs exist.
Your log files (and simular from other users) may make more sense technically, but (and IANAL,get an actual lawyer should leagle answers/advice be desired) in this day and age it's likely not a good idea leagly.
IT occures to me that falling prey to such a practice could leave a man with nothing to loose, and it's failure to notice this (and/or think it through) that causes people to start this sort of thing.
IF threatened with something like this maybe a person might point this out to the boss making the threat, and quitely suggest said person rent Falling Down or any such movie about what can happen when someone has nothing more to loose, or at least thinks so, and snaps.
However this is not advice I'd follow lightly if at all, one could wind up being accused of threatening violence. The real point of such of discussion would be to try and shock the other person into realizing just how such an action could harm another (build empathy) and how BADLY that could backfire (fear of real consequences). If they should somehow come to the concluesion that that such a backfire would be extreemly likely that's just thier own guilty concience.
Now you know why I no longer use symantic or mcafee products. They've become worse than what they are supposed to protect against.
Admittedly in the realm of anti-virus I can see where a sort of arms race may have contributed, but when I can't turn the damn things off to run some piece of software that they don't play nicely with, or idiot moves having to go online to turn on software you need to have running to go online.....
It's sad to see Nortons utilities, once a product I would swear by, become something I can only swear at. Back in the dos/win3.x days nortons diskedit,undelete,defrag, and ndos where real gems of utility, now all you get is absurdities like your story and a dozen extra background tasks just in case you want thier 'controll center' to load in.000001 seconds instead of.001.
I used to tell people "Buy Nortons utilities, you wont regret it" now I send them after the free(eigther/both kinds) utilities. In many cases give them a copy of some of them on mini-cd.
Because they are not in bussiness to help clean out users infected boxes.
In fact it would likely cost them more and expose them to various sorts of issues if they tried to use your (who the heck are you anyway? maybe your THE inet guru of the century, but they don't know you from adam, you could be faking logs just to harrass the guy next door with the loud dog) logs for anything.
Compare having a few telltale questions for thier clueless tech support scripts to lead to the box labled "I'm sorry sir, you have a virus please to get fixed I can no helpy.". To having people cluefull enough to read your logs and understand them, people to call/email the infected machines with a carefully worded explanations, and maybee even *gasp* do something about the infections.
Combine this with them NOT knowing you any more than needed to take your money and the possible increased exposure to litigation (they get one guy suing because they did tell him about his infection and ten more suing becuase they didn't) and you now have to add in lawyers fees for both covering thier asses and then for the lawsuits they despite said coverage (these days such coverage is more to reduce the settlements than to prevent/win suits it seems to me).
Don't get me wrong, your offer to provide said logs was generous gesture, just not one they can likely take you up on.
You might be lucky. All I can say is 12 minutes seems a bit long to me.
First time I ever put an xp machine online without a firewall it was over a connection that on a GOOD day gets 28.8 and it was crashing from blaster less than 5 minutes later.
I've since fixed machines for people who've bought whatever wallmart had and put it online out of the box and many of them have told me they were crashing about time thier hompage loaded. That being whatever thier broadband provider's (usually charter cable or sbc/yahoo) setup disk set it to.
I saw 12 minutes and though 'o.k. they didn't ask to many regular joe's did they'.
Slashdot Mirror
You know I once got a speeding ticket in a Ford aspire, for doing 86 uphill with a missfiring cylinder (and other issues).
Needless to say I got that one tossed out. If you told me an Apire made to 86 falling off a cliff I'd want to know how much cement you had to pack into it.
I've since upgraded to a better Ford, this one is convertable and has this nice horse motif. I guarantee it's faster than the Aspire (3x the engine size for starters).
Mycroft
Oh I believe, I've had simular incedents that didn't go quite as far.
The first was one night on the way home I had this jacked up truck come up behind me doing at least 80 (in a 60, I was doing 60-65) and plant itself about 8 feet off my rear bumper and park there despite it being a two lane highway with no-one else on it in sight.
This truck then proceded to turn on it's brights nearly blinding me with the glare for a split second. I have to duck under the glare and start slowing down hoping the idiot will go around.
Instead the truck just gets closer and starts honking it's horn. Figuring I should get away from the idiot I change lanes, idiot follows, I change again, ditto. So I pull into a brightly lit gas station near my house (where they recognize me) and the truck follows and I see this soccor mom looking woman with a big dog in the cab just starring straight ahead so I go in and call the police. She leaves before they get there.
The second incedent was a few years ago and involved a bunch of teenagers in a car jumping lanes around. They started to jump in front of me from behind a car who's rear bumper was only about 5 feet in front of my front bumper and I had to break and honk at them to avoid getting hit.
They proceded to take offence and start yelling at me and calling me names and such and then got behind me and started jacking around with running up on me and gesturing and so on. So I drove to a police substation nearby and strangly enough despite thier yelling at me to pull over so they could 'kick my ass' the didn't pull into the parkinglot behind me. wonder if the half dozen police cars also parked there had anything to do with it.
Mycroft
Speeding does slow you down. Especially when it's significantly faster than the limit/traffic flow.
The reasoning is simple, there are enough people who don't want to get ticketed, die in a car wreck, ect. that when you are trying to maintain the high rate of speed you will eventually have to go around one of them, and sooner or later you will get stuck in the outside lane by one. The outside lane is called the slow lane for a reason. By the time you Unstick yourself the cars you were in front of in the other lane have already passed you.
Not only that but the spacing and cycle duration of red lights is such that you typically find yourself stoped at one for long enough that all those 'slowpokes' you left behind are now right next to you also waiting for the light to change.
And of course over the long haul the time you spend pulled over getting a ticket brings the average way down (as doese the wasted time on the bus when you finally loose your drivers license).
I average about 30k miles a year, mostly local travel on a few highways and local roads. And based on my experience a fast car is slower than a smart driver. I've frequently pulled up to red lights next to the guy who was so frantic to pass me (when I was already doing the speed limit) twice in about three years I've caught up to the guy made plain his discontent at my only doing +5 over on the highway, except he was pulled over and I'm shure I got where I was going well before he did. I've had idiots 'pass' me three or four times because thier in such a hurry they get themselves repeatedly stuck behind slower traffic.
Mycroft
Speeding does slow you down. Especially when it's significantly faster than the limit/traffic flow.
The reasoning is simple, there are enough people who don't want to get ticketed, die in a car wreck, ect. that when you are trying to maintain the high rate of speed you will eventually have to go around one of them, and sooner or later you will get stuck in the outside lane by one. The outside lane is called the slow lane for a reason. By the time you Unstick yourself the cars you were in front of in the other lane have already passed you.
Not only that but the spacing and cycle duration of red lights is such that you typically find yourself stoped at one for long enough that all those 'slowpokes' you left behind are now right next to you also waiting for the light to change.
And of course over the long haul the time you spend pulled over getting a ticket brings the average way down (as doese the wasted time on the bus when you finally loose your drivers license).
I average about 30k miles a year, mostly local travel on a few highways and local roads. And based on my experience a fast car is slower than a smart driver. I've frequently pulled up to red lights next to the guy who was so frantic to pass me (when I was already doing the speed limit) twice in about three years I've caught up to the guy made plain his discontent at my only doing +5 over on the highway, except he was pulled over and I'm shure I got where I was going well before he did. I've had idiots 'pass' me three or four times because thier in such a hurry they get themselves repeatedly stuck behind slower traffic.
Mycroft
Define to slow, if you mean the speed limit then by definition they are not going to slow, but rather as fast as permited and if you want to got faster you have no right to insist they get a ticket for you.
And no right to inconvience them by insisting they change lanes or whatever just so you can get a ticket sooner.
Smart driving will save more time than speeding anyway.
Mcyroft
The funny thing is all those idiots trying to go so fast are usually stupid enough that they finally lane jocky themselves behind someone doing the minimum and get stuck there.
Of course some manage to do it repeatedly. I recall a few times when the SAME idiot passed by me several times.
Mycroft
I read an article a few years back where ADDING routes for traffic to take actually added to congestion in some cases.
This one city had two basic routs between points a lot of traffic went through and to ease congestion they ran a third road. Congestion went up. After doing some math they realized the problem and made the new road not through and congestion went back down.
Wish I could rember why that worked that way (and no it wasn't grandma/bubba/blondie getting confused over which way to go and parking in everyones way eigther.
Mycroft
Really? I've done quite a bit of driving and haven't yet seen an accident cause by driving to slow.
I've seen (and been involved in) ones cause by people panic stoping or just being stoped without a foot on the break where it's not expected.
However I've seen plenty of accidents caused by people in to big a hurry and eigther lane jumping agressively (and hitting someone or causing the person they cut in front of to slam on the breaks to avoid them) or entering the road or intersection without looking.
I've also seen some caused by idiots trying to use the center lane (the one with yellow stripes on both sides) to make a left ONTO (illeagle in Missouri, USA) the road rather than to exit it as intended.
Mycroft
Actualy it's not the slower drivers, provided they're at or near the speed-limit (in good conditions), granny or bubba doing 30 in a 60 on a nice day is going to be a problem.
Your momentary speed means very little compared to your average.
I drive a LOT, much of it through a township notorious for ticketing it if it moves, and value my good driving record.
I frequently watch as some idiot trying to go 20+ over jumps back and forth between lanes only to eigther arrive at the next red light seconds before I do (these are the 'good' ones) or to arrive there about 5 car lengths behind me in the other lane (these are the guys who at the first sign of a slowdown jump lanes, usually it's from the left lane to the right lane because someone up ahead slowed a bit to enter a turn lane, then the left lane goese back to limit+5 while the idiot is stuck in the right lane with bubba doing 50 in 60).
Driving faster than everyone else doesn't get you there faster, it just wastes your time and energy while risking your driving record and potentially causing serious issues.
What gets you somewhere faster is SMART driving.
I pay attention to traffic flow and know the area around where I live and try to keep it around the speed limit or just above.I have seen the same idiot lane jocky and pass me 4 or 5 times, constantly having to speed up and slow down and get stuck and frustrated behind one person or another and put all sorts of wear and tear on his car and the nerves of all involved. All while I'm still calmly driving along in the same lane (usually the left, it's tend to move a bit faster consistantly with fewer merge-exit cycles)enjoying the sunshine with the top down listening to a cd or radio without tearing up my car.
One sort of Idiot I dont' understand is the guy in the big truck or suv who insists on getting right behind me at night (when frequently I'm the only other vehical out there) and when I'm not going 80+ in a 60, turns on his brights rather than go around. Since my vision is now impared by the glare and I've got someone way to close to me for the speed I'm going to slow down as best I can to try and avoid a wreck (which can be nasty in a convertible).
Actually the ones going to fast are also often jumping lanes. THIS causes people to have to break suddenly compressing the whole collum of traffic behind them if it's near rush hour (but not durring an actual traffic jam, not that you can lane jocky then) which takes longer to decompress and reach normal speed than it took to slow down.
Unless you got a lot a lot of people doing -5 or more without good reason I'd guesse the main cause of congestion is insufficient road ways primarly followed by idiots who think the gas pedal and not thier brains are the key to quicker trip times.
Mycroft
I'm not shure if any of the current (or next gen) consoles or even pc games for that matter do this, but in 3dsMax you have prodcedural textures.
If games were to do this where possible it would scale indefinately. However there is bound to be a significant cpu overhead. Especially when you get translucency and reflection and subsurface scattering involved.
The more I think about the more likely it seems we've got a bit of a wait before this is standard in consoles.
Mycroft
As far as the slowdowns to outright lockups I've seen that fairly consistantly in windows and linux over the last few years (using any adobe plug-in to browser, the straight viewer has had odd sluggishness on both platforms as well), if it's not so on Mac (I'll take your word for it) I would suggest it's case of third rate porting.
As far as what format to send dtp type documents in, almost any other works better imho. And the sort of layout you describe is for eventual paper production, not online information.
EVERY pdf I've ever dealt with was braindamaged somehow and usually no way to fix it. Like most websites these days.
Pdf is simply "here's MY layout, which foolishly imitates a book, and your stuck with it" most of the time anyway. Authors needless lock out all sorts of changes including c&p so I can't even copy it to notepad to change the idiot font.
If you want me to read it then put it in a format I can read or at least make readable.
I don't know about those sizes you list, but a few of those I gave MUCH more time (5 minutes or more on one) to download when slashdots front page (71k as I type this) took only a couple seconds.
Considering my browser is unusable and the rest of my computer sluggish (an amd3550+ with a gig of ram on a good socket 939 mb, a simple document reader shouldn't even be noticed, let alone drag everything to a crawl), I think 5 min is more than fair.
Like I said what's wrong with at least offering an ocr conversion? it'd be less than 100k for all the doc's most likely and MUCH more readable.
To be fair half of my loathing of pdf stems from adobe's brain dead programming (or porting as the case may be) and belief that it's o.k. to lock out the end user from viewing docs how he want's to and wrapping the whole mess in a bad emulation of a book with a craptacular interface.
I sorta thought the not closeing when closed issue was miss-communications. I'm used to closing the master window also closing the program in windows and linux. If you don't want to close a program but get it out of your way just minimize it or move it to another desktop or even iconize it. This way you've always got a clear indicator that it's running still (in theory at least, YMMV). I would hope Mac's provide some way to intuitively know when a program is or isn't still running after you close it's main window.
Mycroft
I know what you mean (I loose people all the time, I'm starting to get good at noticing when the nods go from interested to lost:)
But I was actualy making a joke on how MINDPRISON got a song stuck in my head.
Mycroft
You start sending conscripts and prisoners to the moon and there is no telling what could happen, why someone could start throwing big rocks at you. Wouldn't be to hard with the right computer helping out, not that I'd know anything about that of course.
Mycroft
Mostly you are right. The difference is in recent movies.
A short copyright time, or even median one (say 10-20years like patents) enables the creators to recover things like the odzillion dollars spent on special effects, computer animation, Mr. Muslce's and Miss T.A.'s salary.
However once this money is recouped and a fair amount of time has passed to allow for some proffit, copyright should expire, to drop prices and enrich culture as intended.
So what makes them greedy is thier insistance on keeping thier monopoly long past the time necessary for them to recoup costs and make a fair (admitedly a subject measure) proffit. Especially when they keep something they have no intent of releasing 'just in case' they find a way to get rich off of it or at least to deny potential competitors somethinge they could make $$ off of.
Personally I think copyright should back to it's original (here in the US) time frame or somewhat shorter (especially where computer programs are concerned). I also think if something goese unpublished or the copyright holders cannot be found for ten years (five for software imho) it should be declared an abondoned copyright and moved into the public domain.
I've heard we have movies on old nitrate stock or simular falling apart to be forever lost because the proper holders of the copyright have died and the people who inherit them cannot be found to get permision to copy them into non-degrading formats. At the very least a law could be passed to permit preservative copying of originals that would otherwise be lost.
Mycroft
It's a result of the US signing the Berne convention in 1989. At least I'm pretty shure it's the Berne convention that caused it and that was signed by the US in 1989.
Mycroft
Thanks! now I can't get that song you started to parody out of my head. :)
How did you get that nick anyway
Mycroft
PDF tries to be 'make a computer a book' format, and it's as proprietary as .doc except that it's a bit less obfuscated. .5 seconds with adobe's brain-dead software. But that's not the case for everyone. .5 second in download time your browser is hosed and your computer brought to a crawl. This is braindead programming.
And most of the time it's used the same way online, to bloat text an order or three of magnitude in size.
Though I do agree html shouldn't be invariant, that completely defeats the purpose of html imho.
Using a pdf to bundle images together is the closest thing I've seen to a rational use for it, but that is not it's main use and some manage to even screw doing that up.
The fact that people use it to bundle images of text is just insane when it's a few pages. How about using some ocr software and running a spell check? You get a few k rather than a few megs and don't wast bandwith or need to use a booklike format to bundle the docs.
I understand in a few rare cases actual images of a document are what's needed, but I contend that a format designed for just that sort of thing would be a better idea.
And maybe YOU can download a multi-megabyte file in
In fact that's (I suspect) the real problem. If the document isn't fully downloaded adobe sits there insisting it hog the cpu in a very multi-tasking unfriendly way. On slower connection this means if you hit a pdf link that goes to a file more than your
Frankly I've rarely seen anything that wouldn't have been easier to read and comprehend in eigther html or text. When 99% of the time a format makes viewing the content less intuitive and more difficult the odds are it's broken, eighter conceptually (as in trying to make a computer a book) or funtionally (as in bloats things way up in size or makes them hard to navigate/read). There is a tiny chance that it's just missused 99% of the time, but in that case it's not being targetted to it's proper audience.
As an aside I consider any software that doesn't stop running when I close it out to be broken, you seem to call this fourtunate because this break cancels out adobe's load bloat?!? If everything I ran did that I'd soon have all my memory(ram and virtual) taken up by programs I've supposedly closed.
Since Mac's aren't known for huge memory leaks or needing to re-boot more often than win95 I suspect a missunderstanding here somewhere.
Mycroft
It's like the people who buy things they don't need because the item is 'on sale' for $5 less and insist thier saving $5.
NO, they are NOT saving $5. But try convincing one of them that (don't try to hard, someone may have a psycotic break in the process).
Mycroft
It's not FF, it's the adobe plug-in that has issues with pdf's and takes up 99.9% of the cpu and locks up the browser.
It does the same in IE and I would be suprised to se it do that in any other browser adobe makes a plug in for.
Mycroft
Even if adobe's plug in didn't do stupid things, PDF's are stupid (imho) idea with a poor implentation that I don't want to support.
A computer is different kind of medium than a book, just because they can both use text and pictures doesn't make them interchangeable. And creating a format that bloats text and pics to huge sizes in a braindamaged attempt to make a computer into a book is like fixing up a car to make galloping noises and crap on the road and require reigns to drive and cost 150% of normal.
It's a waste of bandwith and serves no real purpose other than to put $$$ in adobe's coffers.
Mycroft
If you are a consultant/contractor/employee directly (or near enough so) responsible for this field then it would make sense to make use of the logs generated on the job.
However you say USED to work for. In this case they not only have the normal lack of 'chain of liability' should something go wrong with things from using your logs, but they have the added potential isue of a disgruntled employee.
Remember we live in a society where a peeping tom can climb onto a private residence to look through a ladies skylight at her and then SUCCEFULLY sue her when he falls through it.
If they can't 100% cover thier butts in terms of liability it's against thier best intrest to even aknowledge your logs exist.
Your log files (and simular from other users) may make more sense technically, but (and IANAL,get an actual lawyer should leagle answers/advice be desired) in this day and age it's likely not a good idea leagly.
Mycroft
IT occures to me that falling prey to such a practice could leave a man with nothing to loose, and it's failure to notice this (and/or think it through) that causes people to start this sort of thing.
IF threatened with something like this maybe a person might point this out to the boss making the threat, and quitely suggest said person rent Falling Down or any such movie about what can happen when someone has nothing more to loose, or at least thinks so, and snaps.
However this is not advice I'd follow lightly if at all, one could wind up being accused of threatening violence. The real point of such of discussion would be to try and shock the other person into realizing just how such an action could harm another (build empathy) and how BADLY that could backfire (fear of real consequences). If they should somehow come to the concluesion that that such a backfire would be extreemly likely that's just thier own guilty concience.
Mycroft
Now you know why I no longer use symantic or mcafee products. They've become worse than what they are supposed to protect against. .000001 seconds instead of .001.
Admittedly in the realm of anti-virus I can see where a sort of arms race may have contributed, but when I can't turn the damn things off to run some piece of software that they don't play nicely with, or idiot moves having to go online to turn on software you need to have running to go online.....
It's sad to see Nortons utilities, once a product I would swear by, become something I can only swear at. Back in the dos/win3.x days nortons diskedit,undelete,defrag, and ndos where real gems of utility, now all you get is absurdities like your story and a dozen extra background tasks just in case you want thier 'controll center' to load in
I used to tell people "Buy Nortons utilities, you wont regret it" now I send them after the free(eigther/both kinds) utilities. In many cases give them a copy of some of them on mini-cd.
Mycroft
Because they are not in bussiness to help clean out users infected boxes.
In fact it would likely cost them more and expose them to various sorts of issues if they tried to use your (who the heck are you anyway? maybe your THE inet guru of the century, but they don't know you from adam, you could be faking logs just to harrass the guy next door with the loud dog) logs for anything.
Compare having a few telltale questions for thier clueless tech support scripts to lead to the box labled "I'm sorry sir, you have a virus please to get fixed I can no helpy.". To having people cluefull enough to read your logs and understand them, people to call/email the infected machines with a carefully worded explanations, and maybee even *gasp* do something about the infections.
Combine this with them NOT knowing you any more than needed to take your money and the possible increased exposure to litigation (they get one guy suing because they did tell him about his infection and ten more suing becuase they didn't) and you now have to add in lawyers fees for both covering thier asses and then for the lawsuits they despite said coverage (these days such coverage is more to reduce the settlements than to prevent/win suits it seems to me).
Don't get me wrong, your offer to provide said logs was generous gesture, just not one they can likely take you up on.
Mycroft
You might be lucky. All I can say is 12 minutes seems a bit long to me.
First time I ever put an xp machine online without a firewall it was over a connection that on a GOOD day gets 28.8 and it was crashing from blaster less than 5 minutes later.
I've since fixed machines for people who've bought whatever wallmart had and put it online out of the box and many of them have told me they were crashing about time thier hompage loaded. That being whatever thier broadband provider's (usually charter cable or sbc/yahoo) setup disk set it to.
I saw 12 minutes and though 'o.k. they didn't ask to many regular joe's did they'.
Mycroft